Repeating a Titanic Mistake

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The last two weeks have been discouraging for me as a fan of mixed
martial arts. They have been a seemingly endless parade of the
worst things about the sport and in return have offered up
relatively little of the things that make it great. I’m not
normally one to run around proclaiming that the sky is falling, but
many recent developments are especially disturbing because they
reflect ongoing problems. Let’s recap a few high and low
points.

I had looked forward to UFC
223 as a frontrunner for “Event of the Year,” the kind of card
that reminds us why we fell in love with this sport in the first
place. Instead, I watched it fall apart as Tony
Ferguson’s freak knee injury put the most snake-bitten
high-level matchup in MMA history on ice for the fourth time.
Onetime mixed martial artist and current walking PSA for
substance-fueled sociopathy Conor
McGregor managed to thoroughly derail an event of which he
wasn’t even an official part. The now-immortal “bus incident”
dominated sports headlines, as the Skip Baylesses of the world
weighed in with typically sensational and insubstantial hot takes,
and MMA-focused media outlets such as this one were carpeted nearly
wall-to-wall with McGregor news updates and opinion pieces.

In the aftermath of McGregor’s moment in the spotlight, just about
everything else that could go wrong did. Another of the worst
things about MMA, incompetent and peremptory regulation, cropped
up. The New York State Athletic Commission managed to disqualify
potential Ferguson replacements Max
Holloway and Paul Felder
for completely different yet equally incomprehensible reasons. In
the end, the nine-fight lineup that limped across the finish line
on April 7 was a mere ghost of what UFC 223 had once offered.

Meanwhile, Bellator
MMA continued its Jekyll-and-Hyde existence.
Bellator 196 and
Bellator 197 both exemplify the best and worst of this very
confused organization. The best of Bellator was on display: One
thing Bellator does better than the
Ultimate Fighting Championship is use sensible matchmaking to
develop blue-chip prospects, such as Ed Ruth,
A.J.
McKee and Logan
Storley, in an intelligent manner. The rest of Bellator was
also on display, with increasingly desperate-looking efforts to
stack the tops of those same cards with aging ex-UFC talent of any
name value. Bellator has launched an eight-man tournament. Six of
the eight entrants are UFC veterans, with a combined 106 Octagon
appearances between them. At least five will be over the age of 40
by the time the tournament is finished.

Turning my attention elsewhere, UFC strawweight Paige
VanZant’s memoir, “Rise: Surviving the Fight of My Life,” went
on sale. It made news in large part due to the revelation that
VanZant was gang-raped as a high school freshman. The response on
social media was depressing, as anonymous hordes flocked to attack
VanZant’s character, make light of her trauma or simply call her
names. Regardless of anyone’s opinion of VanZant’s accomplishments
or potential as a fighter, this was a low point. It reflects a
culture that is hardly unique to mixed martial arts but is ugly and
upsetting wherever it turns up.

In the midst of an already depressing week, we learned that
Brock
Lesnar’s freshly signed contract with World Wrestling
Entertainment did not preclude him from competing in the UFC. Right
on cue, UFC President Dana White teased the possibility of Lesnar
fighting the winner of the Stipe
Miocic-Daniel
Cormier heavyweight title fight sometime this year. No. Please,
no. That fight exemplifies the cancer that is currently devouring
this sport from the inside. That it is even plausible enough that
I’m writing about it is a symptom.

Whatever you may think of Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta and the Zuffa
era of the UFC, it is undeniable that, to the extent they had the
power to make it so, the best fighters generally fought the best
fighters. There was a sense that the goal of matchmaking was to
figure out who was the best fighter in each weight division, in
essence a constant ongoing tournament. Freakshow matchups certainly
occurred, but they were the exception rather than the rule and did
not usually disrupt that meritocratic flow. Randy
Couture-James Toney
may have been a waste of time, but it didn’t throw any title
pictures into disarray.

That feeling of merit-based matchmaking is a thing of the past. I
pine for the days when the UFC’s worst matchmaking problem was that
“The Ultimate Fighter” routinely put championship fights on hold
for several months while the champion and challenger filmed a
reality TV show. The promotion’s new masters, having acquired the
promotion for an obscenely inflated price at the height of
McGregor- and Ronda
Rousey-fanned interest, are now obliged to look for the Next
Big Thing, as it were. Or even the Last Big Thing, if it promises
to sell pay-per-views.

When I see that Lesnar may make his way to the Octagon this year, I
have to ask: Didn’t we just do this? In case you don’t remember,
Lesnar was announced as a fairly late addition to UFC 200, late
enough to need a special exemption from the UFC to allow him to
compete without being in the United States Anti-Doping Agency drug
testing pool for the requisite four months. To the surprise of
nobody who had seen Lesnar in the WWE that year, he showed up on
the weigh-in scale in rare physical form in July 2016. To the
surprise of some, he thoroughly hammered Mark Hunt in a
dominant decision victory. Whether it was surprising that the win
was revised to a no-contest when Lesnar promptly failed two drug
tests is a question I will leave to the reader.

To me, Lesnar’s drug issues weren’t -- and aren’t -- even the real
problem. The true problem was that Lesnar’s return to the UFC in
2016 was explicitly a one-off affair from the very start. Win or
lose, he was headed back to the world of sports entertainment;
SummerSlam was mere weeks away. There is zero indication that a
Lesnar title fight this year will be any different. That works out
fine for the WWE, since professional wrestling loves when its top
stars have the sheen of being legitimately tough guys. It doesn’t
work as well for the UFC. The UFC’s currency is entertainment, but
the treasure that backs that currency is credibility. Fights that
don’t build that credibility or, worse yet, undermine that
credibility -- as when a roided-up Lesnar mauls a Top 10 fighter,
then whistles his way to the bank -- bankrupt the proposition at
the core of MMA.

Note that I do not blame Lesnar for this in any way. He is a truly
rare athlete and on some level I’m grateful to see him compete in
mixed martial arts no matter how pointless the matchup. He is also
a very savvy businessman who turns 41 this year and has a rapidly
closing window of time in which to monetize his athletic gifts.
Rationally, if he wants to fight MMA once every two years and use
the threat of it to hold Vince McMahon over a barrel, I have to
say: More power to him. What I’m really lamenting here is the
desperate, short-sighted direction MMA’s top promotions exhibit,
where the next big payday seems to overcome all other
considerations. At best, if Lesnar challenges the UFC heavyweight
champ, loses and walks away, it sets the division and all
contenders back by several months. At worst, if he wins and walks
away, the division is a joke, complicated even further if Lesnar
fails another drug test after winning.

In Greek mythology, Atlas was one of the Titans, a race of divine
beings who warred and lost against the gods of Olympus. As
punishment, Zeus condemned Atlas to hold the sky on his shoulders.
Ancient Greek lore is silent on whether Atlas was considered a wise
choice for the job. However, as the Ultimate Fighting Championship
has apparently decided that the sky is falling, I have serious
doubts about the modern-day Atlas the organization appears to be
bringing in as structural support. He’s going to walk away again
and leave the sky to fall down around our ears.